Malcolm left for New York on Sunday. The lawyers believed they had his commitment to return for their February 22 trial date.* Malcolm promised Wallace Muhammad that he made no such deal. Two nights later, by the count of an FBI report, “nine or ten members” of Captain Joseph’s enforcement squad confronted with rifles a like number of Malcolm’s escorts outside the New York Daily News Building, separated by “a large number of New York City police officers.” The next day, Malcolm escaped into the Deep South for the first time in nearly five years. Newspapers reported his destination variously as Tuskegee, Montgomery, and Selma.
Elijah Muhammad also was maneuvering into Alabama through his lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, who had won from the U.S. Supreme Court an order for the pending trial on the prison rights of Thomas X Cooper. He sent Eskridge secretly to visit his other client, Martin Luther King, in Selma, with instructions to propose a summit meeting. King was a “hard working man,” Muhammad told Eskridge, but he “just needs to be put on the right track” by someone old enough to “show him the rough and smooth spots.” Muhammad wanted to make news with King before Malcolm did. He offered to pay King’s way to Phoenix or Chicago if he was short of cash. Any meeting of the two—even a handshake introduction—would be a “bombshell” upon the white devils, he told Eskridge, like the conversion of Muhammad Ali.
NEWS FROM SELMA forced Eskridge to cancel his trip. King rallied volunteers in two mass meetings Sunday night, and on Monday morning, February 1, told an assembly at Brown Chapel that nearly seven hundred people were leaving another church to launch the first Freedom Day in Perry County, thereby expanding the movement to a neighboring courthouse. “I think this is most significant,” said King, “and it reveals that we are going all out.” He announced that Selma’s young people were gathered in a third church nearby, preparing to follow the adult march with one of their own. “Even though they cannot vote, they have a right to make their witness,” King declared, “…that they are determined to be freed through their parents.” He called forward Reverend Reese among the local leaders, and summoned Bevel to give “final instructions” about how to march together this time in continuous rows. “So we are about to move now,” King shouted above a crescendo of clapping and freedom songs.
“At approximately 10:42,” recorded FBI observers, King led “a group of Negroes, estimated at two hundred sixty four,” out of Brown Chapel and down the middle of a deserted Sylvan Street, in a tactic designed to ensure arrest by Wilson Baker instead of the hot-tempered Sheriff Clark. Baker intercepted the line half a block away. Hoarse with laryngitis, he asked King to break up into small groups as before, and retreated when King insisted that the parade ordinance should not interfere with the right of petition. Two blocks later, Baker placed the entire line under arrest. He permitted a kneeling prayer, herded the prisoners upstairs to intake cells at the City Hall building, then tried to send King and Ralph Abernathy away. Their unexpected reemergence from the building attracted reporters who puzzled over a King arrest story that seemed to be fizzling. “And he said we could not come in,” King told them with a shrug. “They were full and we could come back.” Within minutes, when the potential embarrassment of the sidewalk press conference exceeded his desire not to have King in his jail, Baker sent officers to retrieve the last two prisoners.
Cheers erupted when they passed through the gray metal door into a ninety-foot-long holding tank. King and Abernathy made their way around the perimeter catwalk, listening to sad stories and alibis from the prisoners in cells along the exterior walls, shaking hands through the bars. Among those newly arrested, SCLC staff member Charles Fager heard King suggest a “Quaker-type meeting” rather than a speech by himself. Abernathy read from Psalm 27 in his pocket Bible (“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?”), and speakers held forth between freedom songs. Jailers soon transferred the recognizable leaders, including King, to smaller cells downstairs, and then King was summoned to Baker’s office along with young SNCC staff member Frank Soracco.
Baker said he was worried about the schoolchildren, as Sheriff Clark had just arrested nearly five hundred of them. Most were being released to parents pending trial, but some were being bused to a state prison farm. Baker appealed to King to protect the children by sending them back to school where they belonged. Burly and amiable, Baker quoted scripture, snacked incessantly, and offered them nips from his office stock of bourbon. When King made friendly conversation but declined the suggestion, saying the young people must be part of an overall settlement, Baker returned him and Soracco, who had barely spoken, to a cell.
Only six months after attending a California school forum on Mississippi, Soracco found himself across from King inside a Selma jail. After two weeks in daily demonstrations, he had learned to tape thick newspapers inside his pant legs to reduce the bite of cattle prods and winter chill. He was known for having been spared on one previous arrest by an accident. As county deputies had closed in upon him and a SNCC companion inside the jailhouse elevator, their cattle prods ignited a book of matches in the companion’s back pocket, causing a ruckus that spoiled their intent. Soracco ate the jail meals as King fasted for two days. King seemed preoccupied, and refused to leave when Wilson Baker enticed him to do so, but advised Soracco to go. “You’re not going to do any good in here,” King told him.
Front-page headlines in the New York Times were keeping count: “Dr. King and 770 Others Seized” on Monday, and “520 More Seized” on Tuesday after more marches led by Hosea Williams. Five hundred students went to jail Wednesday morning at the Perry County courthouse in Marion (pop. 3,800), thirty miles northwest of Selma, after an Alabama state trooper told SCLC’s James Orange, “Sing one more freedom song and you are under arrest.” Sheriff Clark hauled away three hundred more in Selma on orders from Judge Hare, prompting Wilson Baker to try to make light of dragnet fever among his hard-line rivals in the county government. “The sheriff is in charge of the courthouse,” Baker told reporters, “…but if any of [the prisoners] try to escape, we’re going to let them.”
King was settled with Abernathy in an eight-foot cell. Before a visit from Andrew Young on Wednesday, writing on Waldorf-Astoria stationery left over from the Nobel Prize homecoming in New York, he composed a dozen political directives “to keep national attention focused on Selma.” On word that local leaders were asking Alabama congressmen to investigate conditions in Selma, King instructed Young to jump on the idea by publicly inviting a broader congressional task force. “By all means don’t let them get the offensive,” he wrote. Young emerged from jail in a hurry. He assigned directive number five (“Keep some activity alive every day this week”) to Bernard Lafayette, who was in town from Chicago. On number three, Young called Clarence Jones and others to clarify the President’s responsibility to enforce voting rights under the Fifteenth Amendment.
Before the end of the day, Lee White advised President Johnson that Young was relaying three requests from King: that Johnson send an emissary to Selma, make a statement of support for voting rights in Alabama, and take legislative and executive steps to secure those rights. White reminded the President that Justice Department lawyers were consulting Judge Daniel Thomas over a new order that might speed Negro registration, and recommended that Johnson have him deflect Young with a reply that the administration was taking appropriate steps already. “An alternative which King will probably find unsatisfactory,” White advised, “would be to refer the call to the Attorney General.”
SNCC staff member Prathia Hall arrived late at the nightly strategy session Wednesday in Selma. She reported that two hundred parents had gone to jail in Marion to protest the arrest of five hundred children earlier in the day, and that unlike Selma, where most youth prisoners were quickly released on bail or truancy orders, Perry County had stuffed several hundred young prisoners into a fifty-by-sixteen-foot stockade. Hall said that pastor J. T. Johnson and movement leader Albert Turner had wept in the mass meeting over brutal conditions: prison
ers crammed on bare concrete, provided water in “number 3 tubs” from which they were obliged to drink “like cattle or with their hands.” Disputes broke out among the Selma staff over whether to address these sufferings or fill the jails still more.
Fay Bellamy and Silas Norman missed the stormy meeting for their own private mission to Tuskegee Institute, some seventy-five miles east of Selma on Highway 80. With three thousand students squeezed into the aisles and window casements of Warren Logan Hall, they heard Malcolm X lecture on racial imagery in international relations. If the United States only spent “some of its time getting peace, freedom, and justice for Negroes,” said Malcolm, it would “win the whole world with freedom.” Afterward, Bellamy and Norman pushed their way through to introduce themselves, and Bellamy inquired about a mutual acquaintance. “How is Viola?” she asked. “What is she doing?”
“She’s not doing anything,” Malcolm replied. “She ought to be down here in the South doing work like you.” This response greatly pleased Bellamy and Norman, who were well aware that Malcolm had disparaged civil rights organizations. They were emboldened to invite him to visit their movement the next day, and soon talked their way into rooms near Malcolm’s at the Tuskegee guest house.
Startled FBI agents observed Malcolm X arrive in Selma at 9:47 the next morning. He disappeared into the pastor’s study at Brown Chapel, where reporters were soon banging on the door. They eventually gained admittance for a brief press conference at which the first question was, “Why are you here today?” followed by, “Are you in agreement with Dr. King’s nonviolence?” and “Are you saying that nonviolence ought to be abandoned in Selma?”
Malcolm artfully dodged. When the reporters left, a spokesman followed them to announce nervously that Malcolm would not be addressing the crowd now swelling in the sanctuary to launch the morning demonstration. This decision caused protracted staff debate in the pastor’s study. Norman defended SNCC’s invitation to Malcolm. Bellamy said he would make light bulbs go off in young people’s heads. Andrew Young and others objected that more than light bulbs might go off in volatile Selma. When they pressed Malcolm on what he would say about nonviolence, he replied that he reserved the right to stomp on the toe of anyone who stomped on his first. Bernard Lafayette objected that a toe-stomping war in America would ruin Negroes and enlighten no one, but said he trusted the audience to see that for themselves. Some proposed limitations on what might safely be said, which prompted Malcolm to observe that “nobody puts words in my mouth.” He smiled, seeming to relish how much his presence panicked the SCLC executives. They decided to cushion his remarks by slotting him between their two best nonviolent speakers, Fred Shuttlesworth and James Bevel, then sent for Coretta King and Juanita Abernathy, who were in Selma to visit their husbands, as emergency peacemakers for any incitements.
In his speech, Malcolm ranged from the Congo to slavery’s lingering caste distinctions between house servants and field servants. “I’m a field Negro,” said Malcolm. “…If the master won’t treat me right and he’s sick, I’ll tell the doctor to go the other way.” Still, he offered no tactical advice for the Selma movement. “I’m not intending to try and stir you up and make you do something that you wouldn’t have done anyway,” he said, to applause and a chorus of laughter.
“I pray that God will bless you in everything that you do,” he continued. “I pray that you will grow intellectually, so that you can understand the problems of the world and where you fit into that world picture. And I pray that all the fear that has ever been in your heart will be taken out.” When he finished, Malcolm retreated to the church office during a debate on what his presence threatened or promised for Selma. Diane Nash Bevel came to sit with him, expressly to apologize for local ministers who were denouncing him as a traitor to nonviolence. She told him she found nothing in his remarks that undermined or demeaned her own commitment. Those who practiced nonviolent discipline never demanded it of others, she said, and many of the ministers did not understand nonviolence themselves. Soon after, Malcolm told Coretta King that he had hoped to visit her husband and assure him that he meant to aid rather than hinder his cause, but he had to rush off to a conference in London. An FBI observer recorded that a car bearing Malcolm X drove away at 12:40 P.M. for the Montgomery airport, less than three hours after arriving in Selma.
Not all the day’s events reached King quickly in jail, where he was still writing directives and random thoughts (“Segregation is the invention of a god gone mad”). Wilson Baker raised the pressure of isolation by refusing visits that day by Coretta and Shuttlesworth. King’s writings reflected no notice of Malcolm’s visit to Selma, nor any awareness that President Johnson at a late morning press conference had overruled his protective aides to make precisely the announcement King requested. (“I should like to say that all Americans should be indignant when one American is denied the right to vote,” Johnson declared for the next day’s headlines. “…The basic problem in Selma is the slow pace of voting registration for Negroes….”) On the other hand, Baker made sure King did learn of Judge Thomas’s latest federal decree, which at midday formally suspended a version of the Alabama literacy test, ordered Selma to take at least one hundred applications per registration day, and guaranteed that all applications received by June 1 would be processed before July. This new ruling threw movement aides into new consternation. They canceled afternoon demonstrations to study it, having suspended morning ones in the tempest over Malcolm X. Jailers presented the moratorium to King as confirmation of an effective settlement.
Cut off in his cell, King was skeptical. He wrote instructions for Andrew Young to “call Jack tonight” with a request that the head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, Jack Greenberg, come to Selma to evaluate the Thomas order. “Also please don’t be too soft,” he wrote. “It was a mistake not to march today. In a crisis we must have a sense of drama. Don’t let Baker control our movement.” His notes ranged from grand strategy to deadlines for the church bulletin that would specify Sunday’s preacher at Ebenezer. Other nagging worries remained off the page. There was an audit that week in which IRS agents hoped to make King pay gift tax on speaking fees he routinely endorsed to SCLC.* He was embroiled in a dispute between the national teachers’ unions, because Bayard Rustin had signed King’s name to ads supporting Albert Shanker’s American Federation of Teachers. Above all else King hated jail, which revived his bouts of self-reproach and depression. He decided to post bond the next afternoon.
On Friday morning in Selma, when Rev. C. T. Vivian led a march to test the effect of the new Thomas order, Sheriff Clark arrested the line of seventy-four people on Judge Hare’s ruling that since the registration office was not open, the vigil was a nuisance in contempt of his court. At noon, when a second march of 450 young people met the same fate, an exasperated Wilson Baker promised discipline against an officer who had hurried the arrest line by firing his revolver. Meanwhile, local officials refused new petitions for the county to open the registration office more often than every other Monday.
At 1:12 P.M., King emerged blinking with Abernathy from the Selma jail. One enthusiastic welcomer left a smudge of lipstick on his heavily stubbled cheek, but six members of King’s own Research Committee expressed dismay by telephone over his decision to post bond. Meeting just then at Harry Wachtel’s office on Madison Avenue, they pointed to the ad published that morning in the New York Times: “…THIS IS SELMA, ALABAMA. THERE ARE MORE NEGROES IN JAIL WITH ME THAN THERE ARE ON THE VOTING ROLLS….” Committee members, already peeved to have had no chance to improve what they saw as a knockoff of the famous Birmingham letter, said King’s untimely exit spoiled its impact. Similarly, they said, the fifteen members of Congress whom they had mobilized into Selma for a dramatic afternoon jail visit were milling around instead in the chaos of King’s homecoming at Amelia Boynton’s house, their mission overshadowed. The advisers said a man in King’s position could not come out of jail for nothing.
“Why not?” a
sked Andrew Young from Selma, pleading that King was depressed and needed freedom like anybody else. Nevertheless, the Selma camp was convinced that King must make a statement of purpose coming out—just as he had done going in. Otherwise he would look aimless, or observers might conclude that he accepted the Thomas ruling. They lit on the idea of saying that King had come out of the Selma jail to meet with President Johnson. Young called a press conference for three o’clock at Brown Chapel. Wachtel volunteered to notify the White House.
By the time Lee White returned Wachtel’s calls to ask whether it was too late to stop the announcement, Wachtel said that the Selma news was being cranked already into tomorrow’s front-page headlines: “Dr. King to Seek New Voting Law/Freed Integrationist Will Fly to Capital Monday.” White responded with a tempered version of Johnson’s furious response. “Where the hell does he get off inviting himself to the White House?” Johnson had shouted at White, who told Wachtel that they now faced a “lousy situation” caused by “grandstanding” on the part of King. Wachtel gamely defended the initiative as legitimate politics, and plunged into grueling negotiations that went on all weekend. White said Johnson expected to be tied up all day Monday in the National Security Council, which Wachtel resisted as an excuse until he heard the news bulletins about Vietnam. He told Clarence Jones over an FBI wiretap that while he hated to see such a crisis, at least it meant that Lee White might not be lying.
At his press briefing on Saturday, February 6, Press Secretary George Reedy made front-page news by disclosing the administration’s intent to offer a “strong recommendation” for voting rights legislation before the end of 1965. He straddled questions about whether President Johnson would accommodate or refuse King on Monday, when alarms reached the White House in mid-afternoon (before dawn Sunday, Vietnam time) of a disaster near the mountain village of Pleiku. Guerrillas had overrun Camp Hollowell, a fortified barracks of U.S. Army Special Forces, killing eight, wounding more than a hundred, and destroying ten aircraft on the ground. The shock of a strike on Americans galvanized official Washington, and President Johnson convened the 545th meeting of the National Security Council at 7:45 P.M. that evening. From Saigon, over secure phone lines, Taylor and Bundy were recommending retaliatory bombing raids. McNamara distributed contingency orders for 120 planes to hit four installations in North Vietnam. When polled by President Johnson in the Cabinet Room, all grimly concurred except for Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who said that the local population in South Vietnam “is not behind us, else the Viet Cong could not have carried out their surprise attack.” The President overrode Mansfield behind a consensus that the United States could not sit still for such treatment.
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